Title says it all. I think OGS is THE upcoming Go server with a lot of nice features. It deserves to have an own section.

+1

ditto


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Although … OGS has a very fine forum itself — anything you'd want the devs and mods to know about should rather be posted there.

https://forums.online-go.com/

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

I think it's very unpolished.

ditto

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

“It’s very unpolished”

<cough> Could it be that you had a very personal experience there? </cough> Heliumbaggers are not tolerated there for sure

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

I like OGS it does not have the players that KGS has, or some of the other sites. But I can play it with a chromebook, no download needed. People are friendly, and the developers are helpful and responsive.....

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Walla Walla GO Club -(on FB)

We play because we enjoy the beauty of the game, the snap and feel of real stones, and meeting interesting people. Hope to see ya there! お願いします!

Anthony

I think the futility of adding an OGS subforum has been discussed before.

Apart from that I agree, though. Kibitz is a breeze, coordinates are highlighted on the board and more than that, you can just share entire variations in chat (!!)
The review tools are also decent, there's byoyomi countdown, hourly live tournaments (13x13 blitz, 19x19 blitz and rapid and 9x9 rapid, something for everyone essentially), seperate ratings for live, blitz and correspondence, stone sound and fischer timing, are you kidding me?

I changed my tune on OGS after my windows partitions went nuklear and I was stuck on some outdated linux live cd. KGS with OpenJDK was unplayable as it kept freezing, IGS has usable linux clients, sure, but the ease with which one can play on OGS is pretty awsome actually.

As others have continually pointed out, literally the only thing missing from OGS is strong players. Because right now it's a lot of fingerlickingly awesome features, but you still have to mainly play DDKs.
I have seen there's an l19 ladder on OGS, but it's correspondence 19x19, yuck. A single game can take months..
I would rather like some stronger players participating in the live tournaments. Maybe some l19ers could coordinate meeting at least in 1 daily 19x19 blitz tourney. It'd be fun imho, and can probably help OGS with its popularity issues.

I think the ogs review system is very confusing - if people watching the review do something different on the board then they can't see what you're doing until they hit a back to game or something which just hangs up the entire process for new people. Hell, even trying to erase what you've drawn on the board seems a challenge.

I also disagree with 9x9 and 13x13 rated games unless they start to have their own category.

Pippen's idea has two parts, the first to kick out Kaya which I think most if not all would agree with as Kaya is dead and no one talks about it.

OGS threads are currently in the Turn Based Servers, which is now inaccurate as it also does live play. As to saying OGS feels unpolished, I might actually say it is too polished with so much attention paid to looking swish that loading a game page takes about 20 seconds. If an unpolished UI is a requirement for a dedicated subforum we should kick out KGS, which feels like you are playing in a go server made out of discarded pieces of linoleum from a 1960s kitchen.

Being able to do your own variations in a demo is a very nice idea: one of the most annoying things I find on KGS brodcast demo games (e.g. EGC, or old eurogotv) is that if you stop watching for a moment and miss a few moves and want to go back you need to do Options->View Offline (which doesn't even exist in the applet version) or clone the game. Same problem with trying some variation of your own or replaying move by move coordinates in the kibitz. So being able to go off piste and then syncing back to the reviewer is a nice idea, but maybe the UX could be improved a bit.

How frequent are OGS threads here? Not much I think, but then neither are e.g. wBaduk ones. Personal like/dislike for the server doesn't seem a good criteria. It does have its own chat and forums so maybe that's where a lot of discussion happens for it.

Actually, this is exactly what I mean by unpolished.

If you get the strong players blitz tourney going let us know, it sounds fun to watch. It would be fun seeing some of the regulars here fight it out. And I definitely like the different time options also. (Thanks Bobby)

Regarding the ladder you can arrange to play live with people. (Do to my schedule correspondence is best suited for my needs)

But if there is going to be a subgroup for online servers Kaya should be closed for comments, and OGS deserves its own spot.
Now if we could just get more people playing there.

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Walla Walla GO Club -(on FB)

We play because we enjoy the beauty of the game, the snap and feel of real stones, and meeting interesting people. Hope to see ya there! お願いします!

Anthony

Seems odd OGS doesn't have a spot there as it deserves one and clearly earned it since some time ago (still a very active turn-based server so just maintain it's place in that forum?).


Surprised to see this, don't play much but do watch games there often and there are always many hi to low SDK games going on.

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"Tsumegos are for reading power and Tesujis for knowing which moves to read"

I totally agree with this statement: OGS is awesome. It has it all: review/analyze tools and Go problems, correspondence and live games, tournaments and ladders, a chat and a forum... Its only problem is not having enough Go players there to play live games against someone your own rank.
Not only does it seem legitimate to me that OGS should have its own subgroup here on lifein19x19 (despite OGS having its own forum), but I think that would help promoting it a great deal which in turn could provide the players missing there to make its 'live games' part a viable one.

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Bored with skillful play? Watch my blunders on my YouTube Channel

+1 to removing Kaya, -1 to adding an OGS forum. It already has one and it's nice. I'm actually not sure why a few of the other L19 forums exist, maybe a wider rationalization is in order?

FWIW I agree with the general opinions on OGS - it spends a lot of effort looking swish, but it's had some prominent bugs for as long as the new version has existed, and as far as I can tell they will never, ever get fixed.

These bugs clearly do not matter much to me, because I play on OGS almost exclusively and love it. As a kyu player I have all the opponents I need and the features I really use are mostly very well put together, and playing on mobile is (almost) as painless as playing on a laptop. I am starting to see more dan-graded players around but I have to admit, I don't pay so much attention to what they get up to. Maybe I should.

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Confucius in the Analects says "even playing go is better than eating chips in front of tv all day." -- kivi

Since OGS has gone into the forum business, I'd leave them out of L19.

Ten (Antti Törmänen 7d) seems to lurk/chat a lot there now, but not play. I wish he'd continue his blog instead! (but that is admittedly a more demanding way to waste time from his studies)

I agree on almost all you wrote, but not on this.

First, there are just two devs, both of whom have recently been occupied quite a bit with family stuff (congrats to them, and fine to see where they put their priorities ), and second: the bugs are being worked on. It’s just that it takes a little longer than you and I would wish for. For example that darned stone misplacement bug that only appears on _some_ tablets, therefore has in the past been not repeatable for the devs: it’s being tackled on https://beta.online-go.com/

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

Tom, keep in mind that some of us already played on "old" OGS. We weren't asked if we wanted a fancy HTML5 app or real-time playing. I much rather prefer a clean and fast interface (say, HackerNews, Reddit, dailygammon) than having lots of HTML5 swish that makes it incredibly slow to load (OGS, Facebook, Twitter.) We had a top-notch correspondence server with OGS, now we have a decent correspondence server with a lot of features that are not that really useful for correspondence.

Also, OGS had no "outstanding" bugs. I still remember the 9x9 handicap bug that the developers took a year or so to fix (and probably amounted to adding 2-3 if's or a case somewhere in the handicap code,) it rendered 9x9 handicap tournaments totally worthless. Oh, and there was also a bug where IIRC setting handicap to none sometimes resulted in handicap being applied (yikes.) I repeatedly complained about some bugs present on small boards, and was mostly ignored in almost all of them (at least now we have nigiri in ladder games, wooo.) So I no longer care about reporting bugs or if I dislike something about OGS. I just play there because the 9x9 ladder is a strong and good one, and that's it. I'm occasionally tempted to go back to Dragon or Littlegolem for that, though.

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

Flyordie should be given its own forum.